Hit and Run

Coming back from an accident, a veteran racer has a breakthrough.

I have replayed that bike ride over and over with the intensity of a detective re-creating a crime scene. It was a beautiful summer day, and as it was an off-day from running, I could decide between a swim and a bike ride, either of them useful for my upcoming triathlon. I chose the bike. My route took me west, into the quiet backstreets near my home in the suburbs of Chicago. I approached an intersection at a decent clip, noting the car arriving from the right, saw it slowing at the stop sign, certain that—as had happened every single time before—the driver would see me and let me pass before pulling into the intersection. But she did not. Despite what you might have heard, time did not slow down. I had enough time to shout "Stop! Stop!" but not enough for either of us to do so. The impacts—first with the car, then with the ground—hurt, as expectations and the laws of physics would predict. I lay on the ground, fetally curled on my side, struggling to breathe, and I decided not to move, afraid that if I tried, I wouldn't be able to.

The paramedics checked me thoroughly, finding nothing obviously wrong, and one of them said, "We could take you to the hospital, if you request that, or perhaps you would just like to go home." I immediately started to feel bad for wasting everybody's time. "Let me see if I can shake this off," I said, and for the first time since the impact, I tried to sit up. And then, an invisible angry dwarf stabbed me in the back, and I screamed and froze, too terrified to continue getting up, or to lie back down, or do anything, ever again.

"We figured out what's wrong with you," said the neurosurgeon, visiting my hospital room three days later. "You broke off the transverse processes on your lower vertebrae. Those are the little structures that stick out the side of your spine, where your back muscles attach. The good news is that you won't need surgery. The bad news is that it's going to hurt a lot for a while." He smiled, sprouted huge bat wings, and flew out the window. Then, a day later, the hospital stopped giving me morphine and sent me home to recuperate and remain immobile.

The problem with being immobile, I thought, gripping my easy chair, is that you can't move. For months, I had been training for two big events, the Chicago Triathlon and the Chicago Marathon. And over long years before that, I had incorporated running into my definition of self. Like it says at the bottom of this column: I'm a marathoner! Now I was frozen in place, by pain and the fear of pain, corkscrewing downward in a gloom spiral: If your most reliable cure for depression is running, what do you do when you're depressed because you can't run? And all because of a stupid, avoidable collision that made me wince with remembered pain every time I thought of it.

Two weeks after the accident, the doctor gave me the okay to begin—lightly, gingerly—exercising again. I limped to the gym and lowered myself into a recumbent stationary bike, and I cautiously rotated the pedals, desperately lapping up the faint fumes of endorphins like an alcoholic licking a bottle. I managed 20 minutes before my back started to bark at me. I was thrilled to have broken a sweat due to something other than terror or anxiety, but I still felt pathetic and small. Perhaps I'd use the hand-bike next, after making myself feel better about my fragility by first bumping the senior citizen using it to the floor.